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KAlarm: Your Fancy Alarm Clock

On the most basic level, KAlarm is an alarm clock with multiple alarms. It goes way beyond that but this is a good place to start. Unlike organizer tools such as KOrganizer, it just deals with alarms.

Let's look at some possible applications. My trash day is Thursday. If I get to the computer before I take out the trash (a common event) then I typically forget until I hear the truck coming down the street. What I need is a big red flag and a constant beep that come on on Thurday at 7AM and doesn't go away until I tell them to go away.

This is a perfect KAlarm job. Here is what I need to do to set this up.

Bring up KAlarm either from the menus or using Alt-F2 and entering kalarm. You will see a window similar to this.

Click on Actions and select New. A new window shows up.

Under action, you can select text (for a text message) and type in "take out trash", check sound, click on the note and select a sound file and then check repeat.

In the time section, select AT date/time and pick the date and time for the first alarm.

Click on Try to see and hear what you get.

If you are not happy with the result, edit away chainging the sound, background color, font and text color.

Once you are happy, click on the Recurrence tab, select Weekly and then select Thursday.

Click on Ok and you are set.

You will be taken back to the original window but you will see your event added there.
I have added a second event called "Beer Time" at 6PM every day. The only tricky thing is that I wanted this to be daily but only Monday thru Friday. This is easily handled by selecting Weekly and then selecting the five days I want the event to happen on.

Any of these events can be edited or deleted by right-clicking on them in this window. Right-clicking in this window is another way to add new events.

This is a very basic look at KAlarm. Actions are not limited to a text message in a colored box and include the ability to run other programs. The important thing is that KAlarm is there to help and makes a nice, convenient place to organize these basic events.